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[e330131]

Well apparently I’ve gotten too old to follow complex instructions anymore. I have owned ghost 15 for about 8 months and have only succeeded in total frustration. I’m running win 7 and trying to clone my drive to an external USB drive. I know, I know there is no such word as clone in Ghost 15. All the terms have changed for some demented reason. Is Norton now Government owned? I’m just venting because I’ve spent somewhere between 50 and 70 hours on this over an 8 month period and finally realize that it just isn’t going to happen. The confusion level has gone up and my mental capacity has gone down. Somewhere along the way they passed each other buy. I live in a world of acronyms, and I don’t know what they mean. Even when I find out what the acronym stands for, I don’t know what that means and even if I found out what it meant I would have forgotten why I wanted to know. What happened to the KISS method? I know that there is a certain amount of pride and prestige in making a program so complicated that everyone thinks: Oh he must be really smart! Bull scat! I think if a programmer made programs for old people (i.e. simple and easy to use for old dummies like me who sometimes can’t remember why he got in the car and left the house) everyone would think he was really smart, because he really would be. Thank you for your time. John P.S. I hope that everyone understands that when I say He, I use it because it is one less letter than She.

[DStain]

e330131,

Welcome to the club,

to save you trying anymore you can't "clone" an internal source drive to an external USB drive.

What you can do is run a full backup of your computer onto the external USB drive.

That will create a recovery point (.v2i files) that can then be used to run an image - transfer onto a new internal drive, called an Image-Restore or "clone". Got it?

Deric

[Brian_K]

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e330131 wrote:
 All the terms have changed for some demented reason.

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John, it confuses everyone. Even the term image has been removed from the Ghost lexicon.

Please let us know why you want to clone your drive to an external USB drive and we'll help out. I can think of several reasons to clone a drive but I need to know your reason.

[e330131]

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DStain wrote:

e330131,

Welcome to the club,

to save you trying anymore you can't "clone" an internal source drive to an external USB drive.

What you can do is run a full backup of your computer onto the external USB drive.

That will create a recovery point (.v2i files) that can then be used to run an image - transfer onto a new internal drive, called an Image-Restore or "clone". Got it?

Deric

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Maybe!!!

John

[e330131]

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Brian_K wrote:

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e330131 wrote:
 All the terms have changed for some demented reason.

---

John, it confuses everyone. Even the term image has been removed from the Ghost lexicon.

Please let us know why you want to clone your drive to an external USB drive and we'll help out. I can think of several reasons to clone a drive but I need to know your reason.

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Thanks,

Here is what I’m trying to do: I do not trust just doing a backup without testing it. I have had many people crash there HD and when they replaced it and tried to restore, it wouldn’t work. What I’ve done in the past (before I bought a new computer with Win 7 on it) was to clone my drive so that after it was cloned I replaced my internal drive with the clone and booted it up for testing. That way I knew that it worked properly and all I needed to do if my drive crashed was to put the clone in and I could keep on working without skipping a beat.

Things are different now. Now I need to put everything on a USB portable drive and then replace my internal with my spare and restore it. Then boot it up for testing and I again have a drive that I can just install when needed and I’m good to go again. Sounds simple! Ha! Ha! Ha!

John

[Brian_K]

John,

As Deric mentioned, cloning to a USB external HD may not work as the HD should be internal for the procedure. For geometry reasons. Even so, cloning to an internal HD is recommended for upgrading to a new HD, not as a backup technique. It gives you only one copy of your OS. With images you can have multiple generations of backups. Nice to have if your most recent backup image is virus infected. You can just use an older image. You can't do that with your single clone.

We use images. I've restored many thousands of images and I've never seen a failed restore so I'm not in the "test restore every image camp". I just create the images, have them verified and move on.

Can you post a screenshot of Disk Management and we can advise the best way to backup your HD. Win7 makes it harder than WinXP.

[philipm785]

Ghost excels at image based backup. If however you just want to clone bootable disks, I suggest Casper from Future Systems. Casper doesn't do images at all and, in my opinion, is more of a migration tool than a backup tool. But it you want easy, bullet proof cloning (including to external drives), Casper is the way to go.

[DStain]

There is only a real need to clone a drive once in my opinion and keep it,once tested out, in case of a primary drive failure.

A primary drive failure can happen I suppose but hasn't happened to me yet, I did have a spare eSata drive fail once though but that was only used for backups.

Like Brian pointed out backups or recovery points are the way forward, and, like Brian I have "re-imaged" many times without a failure even on a multi boot machine. 

I must admit though I tend to use the "One Time Backup" option with Ghost because I only backup the operating systems and apps, all data is stored on a separate drive and backed up on a daily basis by a third party software.

Having said that I still run incremental backups of the data drive and O/Ss drives with Ghost just to monitor how the incrementals perform and it has the advantage to recover with the latest updates on the O/Ss if I need to at any time and I must say that arrangement is very reliable.

Deric

[e330131]

Disk 1 (new volume (E:)) is the USB portable drive.

Does this look like a good backup?

John

[DStain]

John,

It will be a while before Brian and Dave can have a look at it but it looks to me that you have tried a "Clone" onto the external USB drive.

Terminology is what we spoke about in previous posts and this pic is Not a backup.

 Backup is a copy of your computer primary drive using the option "Backup My Computer" and "Define New"

Clone is a true Copy of the Full HDD the primary drive which I think is what you have attempted to do.

I would in the mean time run a "Define New" backup onto your external drive into a folder called say "Backup 1" and direct the backup or recovery point into that folder.

When you start the "computer backup" highlight all the partitions on the disk 0 (the primary drive) and follow the rest of the settings and Ghost will backup that drive.

This action will create a "recovery point" .v2i files that you can use to recover the computer in case of a crash and they can then also be used to "clone" a new drive incase of a primary drive failure.

Deric